Thank you, Crikey reader Tim Deyzel for this comprehensive shellacking:

Re. “Thorpe’s ‘many medals for Qantas’ — just a dash for cash?” (yesterday, item 6). Odd that radical changes in the Arab world, ongoing WikiLeaks leaks and a massive cyclonic slap to Queensland were less important to Crikey than the return to a pool of a bored (possibly broke) swimmer. Three full-length articles dedicated to the hopes and dreams of an individual and his sponsors are noise at best.

If you’re beset by production/technical problems, and short on editing resources, then here’s an easy way of gaining some perspective:

1) Run all three articles through a word cloud generator:

thorpe-word-cloud

2) Pick the most frequent (i.e. biggest) words. In this case let’s say the top three
3) Take ‘Thorpe’; ‘return’; ‘swimming’ and rework into a meaningful sentence or headline
4) “Thorpe returns to swimming” will do
5) Insert as a one-line entry in ‘Media Briefs (if you must)
6) Wait until 2012 for your next installment when you report “Thorpe Not Selected”, “Thorpe Wins X Medals” or “Thorpe Wins No Medals” (if you must)

Any more coverage than this and you’re just pandering to the national insecurity, which equates the national sporting interest with the national economic/commercial/political/security/etc interest.

In our defence, Tim, we took the opportunity to run yesterday’s entire edition through a wordle, tag cloud thingummy:

Crikey 3 Feb wordle

But point taken, nonetheless. Can we interest you in a trip to London in 2012 to provide our poolside coverage?